Dallas Jury Awards $1.04 Billion Against J&J Over Defective Pinnacle Hip Implants

Johnson and Johnson sold its DePuy Pinnacle Ultamet hip system to roughly 150,000 Americans before pulling the device from the market in 2013, years after internal testing had raised questions about how its metal-on-metal bearing surface performed inside a human body. The implant paired a cobalt-chromium ball against a cobalt-chromium socket. Over time, friction between the two components shed metallic debris into surrounding tissue and, in many patients, into the bloodstream.

Six California residents, including lead plaintiff Angie Rodriguez, each underwent surgery to have a Pinnacle implant placed and later faced revision operations to remove it. They filed claims in the multidistrict litigation consolidated before U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade in the Northern District of Texas, MDL 2244, one of the largest device-liability dockets in federal court.

W. Mark Lanier tried the case over eight weeks in the fall of 2016. The plaintiffs argued that DePuy and its parent company knew the metal-on-metal design carried failure risks that far exceeded what the company disclosed to surgeons or patients, and that J&J chose not to conduct pre-market human clinical testing before releasing the device. The jury found the Pinnacle implant negligently designed and concluded that J&J had fraudulently marketed it while concealing known dangers from physicians.

On December 1, 2016, the jury returned a verdict of $1.04 billion, composed of $32 million in compensatory damages spread across the six plaintiffs and approximately $1.008 billion in punitive damages. The award ranked among the three largest jury verdicts of any type in the United States that year and was the largest punitive award against a company in 2016.

Judge Kinkeade subsequently reduced the punitive portion to align with constitutional due-process limits on the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages, bringing the total to approximately $543 million. Johnson and Johnson appealed, contesting both the liability findings and the size of the award.